Pavel Florensky on Art: An Afterword to the Might-Have- Been Dialogue with Lev Vygotsky

The paper points to a growing interest that modern psychology has in cultural-historical psychology and its interconnections with other theories and concepts, for instance, with Pavel Florensky's anthropological concept. The paper outlines Florensky's approach to the analysis of space that he set forth in his "Analysis of Space and Time in Artistic and Graphic Works", focuses on the features of psychophysiological space described in his concept and on the differences that Florensky sees between it and the space as it is understood within Euclidean classical geometry which has too deep a root in ordinary minds. Methodological principles inde- pendently shared by Florensky and Vygotsky have much in common: rejection of the classical scientific char- acter, holism, activity approach. The author also draws a parallel between Florensky's concepts of composition and construction of the works of art and Vygotsky's principle of "destruction of content by form" described in The Psychology of Art. The analysis of a piece of architecture provided in the paper shows how the theoretical principles formulated by Florensky and Vygotsky can be integrated.

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